The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective

Title: The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective
Author: Jo Nichols
Published: August 19, 2025 by Minotaur Books
Format: Hardcover, 342Pages
Genre: Amateur Sleuth
Series: Marigold Cottages Murders #1

Blurb: Mrs. B, the landlady of The Marigold Cottages is a stubborn idealist who only rents to people she cares about: Sophie, an anxious young playwright with a dark past; Hamilton, an agoraphobe who likes to overshare; Ocean, a queer sculptor raising two kids alone; the perfectionist Lily-Ann; and Nicholas, a finance bro who’s hiding secrets.

The tenants live contentedly in their doll-house bungalows in Santa Barbara, just minutes from the beach, until their peace is shattered when Anthony, a quiet, hulking, but potentially violent ex-con moves in. Three weeks later, a dead body is discovered on the streets of the peaceful neighborhood. Anthony is arrested, and the tenants heave sighs of relief. Until Mrs. B, convinced that he's innocent, marches down to the police station and confesses to the crime herself. The tenants band together and form “The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective” to save their beloved landlady. As clues are unearthed and secrets are revealed, the community of misfits only grows more tight-knit...until a second body is found.

My Opinion: You know that feeling when you open a book and immediately realize you’re going to need a mental seating chart? That was me with this novel. It took longer than expected to keep everyone straight, but once the cast settled in my mind, the story moved with an easy, weekend-ready rhythm. It’s a fast read, it flows well, and even when the ending made me scrunch my brows and tilt my head, I still enjoyed the ride.

The real charm comes from the residents of the Marigold Cottages—“idiosyncratic,” as the author lovingly calls them. They’re the kind of neighbors you’d want nearby for the gossip, the baked goods, and the fierce loyalty… while also keeping just enough distance to avoid becoming the next topic of conversation. Mrs. B, the owner of the cottages and official matriarch, sets the tone: everyone knows everyone’s business, but everyone also looks out for one another. It’s messy, heartfelt, and oddly comforting.

One of the book’s standout features is its structure. Paragraphs blend with text messages and even stage-play-style dialogue, and instead of feeling gimmicky, the shifts add energy. The format never distracts from the plot; if anything, it mirrors the chaotic, overlapping lives of this little community.

When one of their own is threatened with murder charges, the group rallies—loudly, imperfectly, and with plenty of secrets bubbling up at the worst possible moments. Those secrets complicate everything, but they also reveal the strengths and vulnerabilities that make this rag tag crew worth rooting for.

And then there’s the whale moment. A small scene, but it hits with surprising emotional weight—sadness, hope, longing, resignation all braided together. It’s the kind of quiet beat that lingers.

By the time the mystery reaches its conclusion, the whos and whys get twisty enough that I had to slow down, reread a few sections, and mentally sketch out how the pieces fit. It’s not confusing in a frustrating way—more like a puzzle that requires a second look.

This appears to be the first in a new series, and I’m genuinely looking forward to returning to this eccentric Santa Barbara enclave. They’re misfits, sure, but they’re living their best lives, and I’m happy to follow along.

A Marriage at Sea

Title: A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
Author: Sophie Elmhirst
Published: July 8, 2025 by Riverhead Books
Format: 256 pages, Hardcover
Genre: Nonfiction

Blurb: Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away?

Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves.

What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves.

Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.

My Opinion: A few chapters into this novel, I knew I could never have crossed an ocean, let alone a street, with Maurice. He isn’t brilliant; he just believes he is. Socially awkward, self absorbed, and convinced of his own superiority, he’s the last person you’d want beside you in a crisis. Maralyn, meanwhile, is his opposite—easygoing, hopeful, and somehow willing to follow him into a life at sea despite fearing water and never learning to swim.

Elmhirst tells you early on what happened to them, so the anticipation comes from watching how they survive 118 days adrift. Before that ordeal, we see them in the 1960s building a life, a boat, and a dream together. It might have stayed idealistic if Maurice hadn’t insisted on sailing without a radio transmitter because he wanted a “pure” escape from the world. Trust me, I talked back to the book more than once.

When disaster hits, Maralyn becomes the reason they stay alive. She fights the elements, wrestles sea turtles for food, and pushes against Maurice’s bleak worldview. He sees survival as a never-ending list of disappointments; she refuses to let go of hope. Their dynamic is as edgy as the storms around them.

Maurice has moments of reflection, but some of his journal entries made me want to throw an oar at him—especially when he admits he felt no desire for his wife during their darkest hours, even as she kept them afloat. It’s hard to root for a man who can be that cold.

And yet, in the epilogue, Elmhirst manages to stir a flicker of sympathy for him. For a moment, I felt the weight of his loneliness without Maralyn. But sympathy doesn’t change the truth: he wasn’t a good partner, and he wouldn’t be remembered at all if not for a whale and a patient wife.

Elmhirst’s creative nonfiction style is engaging, weaving the Baileys’ journals into a vivid narrative. But for me, the heart of the book is Maralyn—steady, hopeful, and far stronger than the narcissistic man she followed to sea.

A Ghastly Catastrophe

Title: A Ghastly Catastrophe
Author: Deanna Raybourn
Published: March 3, 2026 by Berkley
Format: Kindle, 336 Pages
Genre: Historical Mystery
Series: Veronica Speedwell #10

Blurb: When the corpse of an entitled young man is found entirely drained of blood in a carriage next to Highgate Cemetery, Veronica’s interest is piqued. And then a second victim is found, his death made to look like a suicide, and Veronica and her intrepid beau, Stoker, know the hunt is on. The two men share one link: they were both members of a society so secretive that only a singular mention of it can be found anywhere.

Thirsty for more clues, Veronica and Stoker hear that a young Roma boy may know more about their first victim, but the only way to the boy is through an old acquaintance of Stoker’s, Lady Julia Brisbane. Lady Julia and her dashing husband, Nicholas, occasionally track down murderers and are only too happy to help. But as it becomes clear the secret society is a dangerous sect looking to entice immortality seekers, Veronica and Stoker find themselves ensnared by a decidedly more sinister couple.

The professed leader of the society claims to be a creature of the night; his partner practices witchcraft and they both fancy themselves emissaries of the otherworldly. Just as Veronica and Stoker get closer to learning the true purpose of the society and unraveling this macabre mystery, another body turns up, and they quickly discover they’ve gone from being the hunters to the hunted.

My Opinion: Another entry in one of my favorite series, this novel delivers the charm, humor, and character chemistry I keep coming back for—just not without testing my patience along the way.

The book is packed with idioms, archaic vocabulary, and British slang, which was enough to make me grateful for having a dictionary at the ready while reading on my Kindle. Once you either accept or ignore the linguistic flourishes, the story underneath is genuinely good. The banter is sharp, the humor lands, and the characters remain as magnetic as ever. It’s a quick read in that familiar Raybourn way: even when the pacing wobbles, the world doesn’t want to let you go.

One of the real pleasures here is seeing Veronica feel like herself again. In the last couple of books, she drifted toward a softer, almost fawning version of her usual self—something that dulled the spark that makes her so compelling. This time, she’s back to her sharp, incisive, wonderfully “Veronica ish” self, and it’s a relief.

But the novel isn’t without its frustrations. The reliance on obscure vocabulary slows down the reading, and the story itself becomes bogged down in overly descriptive scenes and unnecessary detours. The main plot keeps slipping out of focus, and for a series that usually balances momentum with atmosphere so well, that imbalance stands out. I’ve read every book in this series, and I can’t remember another that left me quite this irritated.

Even so, the characters, the bickering, and the humor still shine. I just hope that next time Raybourn sets aside the thesaurus and leans into what she does best: telling an engaging, tightly paced story with the characters readers adore.

Girl Dinner

Title: Girl Dinner
Author: Olivie Blake
Published: October 21, 2025 by Tor Books
Format: Kindle, 368 Pages
Genre: Horror

Blurb:Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally respected.

After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she's taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as easy prey.

Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner's new position at the cutthroat University. After 18 months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane's clothes don’t fit right, her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is, and even the few hours a day she's apart from her child fill her psyche with paralyzing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane so desperately craves.

As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power.

My Opinion: Blake is one of those authors you either fall for or quietly back away from. There’s rarely a middle ground. My first encounter with her work was Gifted & Talented, which I ended up enjoying far more than I expected, so when Girl Dinner crossed my path, I figured I was ready for whatever she had in store.

Turns out, I wasn’t.

This novel is… a lot. It opens at a crawl, the kind of slow where you start wondering why you’re here and whether the payoff will be worth it. Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, the floor drops out, and you realize you’re in a very different book than the one you thought you were reading. I was genuinely glad I stuck around for the shift.

Part of the whiplash was my own doing. I didn’t check the genre or read a single review beforehand. I went in expecting women’s fiction with a slight academic edge. And to be fair, the early chapters lean into that familiar “who am I, who do I want to be” introspection. But by the time I reached the middle, I had to admit I’d completely misread the assignment.

There’s one scene, in particular, that made an involuntary, very loud “WTF” fly out of my mouth. Thank goodness I wasn’t in public. I sat there blinking at the page, wondering how we got from point A to whatever fresh chaos point B was supposed to be.

Only after the fact did I go back and see that this book is categorized as horror. Horror is not usually my genre of choice, mostly because so few books commit to the label. This one does. Enough that I set it across the room and gave it a suspicious look for a couple of days before picking it back up.

What Blake is doing here is layered: feminist theory, social commentary, satire (maybe), power dynamics, academic politics, hedonism, the whole messy tangle of how women are shaped and consumed by the systems around them. At a certain point, I stopped trying to decide whether it was satire and just let the book be what it was. I hadn’t planned on dropping everything to finish it, but that’s exactly what happened.

What begins as a slow simmer turns into something far stranger and more compelling. Blake’s writing is polarizing, but in the two books I’ve read so far, she hasn’t let me down. And that final twist? I’m not sure I needed it, but I was absolutely delighted it was there. Apparently, I did need that last jolt, because I’m still sitting here muttering, “Olivie Blake, what did you do to me?”